An actually important epistemological question

Here’s an important epistemological (and zetetic) question:

Which methods can agents like us use to reliably get at the truth?

In other words, given the situation we find ourselves in, how do we determine what’s true? If you construe ‘situation’ very broadly, the line of questioning becomes abstractly philosophical. But construed narrowly, the question is of utmost practical importance. What methods should people today be using in their daily lives to reliably get at the truth?

This question is even more urgent now because we find ourselves in an utterly degraded information environment. Our sources of information are structured by algorithms optimized not to give us an accurate picture of what’s happening, but to get us to engage by clicking, commenting, and sharing. They push us into bubbles which distort our views through selection effects and polarize us. They platform the voices and events that are most intriguing, shocking, and exciting, not the most representative.1

To get back on track, people will need to learn how navigate this environment and come closer to reality. Not only this, but they need the basics as well: they need to know the more general tools of inquiry that reliably get at truth across many different kinds of situations.

Unfortunately, there is no field dedicated to doing this. Epistemology as practiced in academic philosophy is a theoretical field focused on abstract questions about the nature of knowledge, the relation of partial belief (credence) to full belief, and other interesting but largely practically irrelevant questions. (And if you have some patience, I will address “applied” and “social” epistemology in a brief moment.)

And that’s (mostly) fine! I’m not necessarily saying academic philosophers should be focused on practical matters. But there is a need for a discipline that stands to epistemology as chemical engineering stands to chemistry. I call it ‘practical epistemology’.

It starts in the schools

In public schools, you learn the basics of math and science, you learn how to read and write, you play sports, you practice music, perhaps you learn a foreign language. You don’t learn how to figure out what’s true.

Maybe the hope is that by learning all these other things, you will implicitly figure this out. Looking at the state of the world, this hope should be shot in the back of the head, entombed in many layers of concrete, and cast out into the Arctic ocean never to be spoken of again.

Imagine if practical epistemology were given a place in schools as central as history or math. You would start by learning the basics of analyzing arguments and evidence. You would advance to studying informal fallacies, cognitive biases, and balanced methods for gathering evidence in the online environment. Eventually, in late high school you could be studying Bayesian methods of handling inductive evidence and formal deductive methods. I don’t know, I’m not a curriculum designer but it seems like there’s enough material even now to support a healthy series of courses like that.

To be fair, some of this stuff is taught in a piecemeal way in various other courses. For example, I remember a unit on informal fallacies in AP English Composition. My point is, this stuff is so important, especially in an increasingly complicated world and degraded information environment, that it needs a dedicated and systematic place alongside other fundamental topics like science and history.

I acknowledge that many students will probably get nothing from this, if only because many students get little out of any education. But there are many otherwise competent people today that are completely adrift epistemically. And I’m not just talking about your colleagues who get all their information from insert online bubble here. Step outside. Talk to some people. Even look inwards, perhaps.

For some of the adrift, I believe they never got the basics and never had to develop them. In many environments, it’s quite easy to get by doing little more than accepting the claims of people you know at face value. For even more of the adrift, the information environment has become so toxic and polluted that the methods they previously used successfully have now become unreliable, and it’s hard to adjust.

A vision of the discipline of practical epistemology

A thriving discipline of practical epistemology would be multi-disciplinary. It would incorporate insights across fields like psychology, cognitive science, statistics, and even anthropology and history. It would be interesting. It would be important. It doesn’t exist.

Here are some loose strands to flesh this vision out:

• Imagine undertaking studies of various information environments across human history to gain empirical insights about which epistemic methods were most successful in navigating them. Perhaps some of them more closely mirror our own situation. These insights could then be applied to contemporary advice and strategies.

• Imagine incorporating work in psychology and cognitive science on cognitive biases into the teaching of Bayesian methods to help people avoid common errors when handling inductive evidence.

• Imagine projects aimed at teaching the reasons behind why online bubbles distort your epistemic position (e.g. selection effects) and giving real life examples that demonstrate this phenomenon. This could be used to give general purpose advice that would help people understand better how to navigate a fractured information environment.

My imagination is vague and picturesque. But there is interesting and important work here for academics, work that might even trickle out to the broader population.

Why applied and social epistemology are not practical epistemology

Some people reading this are thinking: “Wait a minute! This is exactly what the turn towards applied and social epistemology are. You are one of those bad philosophers who reads nothing and then claims to have invented something new!”

Well, first, fair. I haven’t read as much as I should have. In our (philosophers) collective defense, the human body of writing is vast and the technical tools we have to navigate it are not up to the task.

Also, to be clear, I don’t claim any originality here for the overall approach. Lots of people talk about the importance of teaching “critical thinking”. Maybe there’s something new about the particular connections or approach I’m taking here, but I make no claims to originality.

But much more importantly, social and applied epistemology are still theoretical disciplines that mostly are about abstract and normative questions (as applied to more specific situations, and especially social situations), not about the practical issue of determining the epistemological methods to use to navigate our lives. I’m painting with a broad brush here, but that’s my overall impression of these literatures.

Let me expand on the differences2:

• Theoretical vs Pragmatic: Practical epistemology would be more of a practical discipline like chemical engineering than a theoretical discipline like chemistry. Applied and social epistemology are more theoretical, being focused on interesting philosophical and theoretical questions that arise when applying epistemic norms to realistic or semi-realistic situations. This is natural, because philosophy is a theoretical discipline.

• Veritism as a structuring force: Like traditional epistemology, these subfields are focused on questions about epistemic justification, knowledge, rationality, and so on (as applied to particular situations). Practical epistemology would be narrowly focused on the methods to use produce truth-tracking beliefs in ordinary situations. While there are indeed interesting questions about when this suffices for knowledge, rational belief, justified belief, etc., these questions are, for the most part, not practically relevant. As I said, practical epistemology would be like an engineering project. The goal is to give people the tools to come closer to tracking reality.

• Interdisciplinarity: These subfields exist squarely within the philosophy department; they are not truly interdisciplinary. The best of this literature is in conversation with real empirical work in other fields when it aims to touch on genuine empirical issues (as opposed to toy cases used for illustrating more theoretical normative issues). The worst of it approaches complicated empirical issues from a purely a priori perspective. (There are some other unsavory tendencies of the bad kind of analytic philosophy at play as well, like doing little more in a paper than dressing up some obvious claims in the style of an analytic philosophy paper just to get a publication. Don’t get me wrong, there’s good and honest work here as well.) Practical epistemology would be genuinely interdisciplinary.

Again, I’m not saying philosophers should only be doing practically oriented work and these subfields should be abandoned, I’m saying we also need a discipline of practical epistemology. People working in these subfields undoubtedly have a large role to play in such a discipline.

Tepid interventions

It’s possible (and I hesitate to say this) that academic philosophers can actually play a constructive role here. The prospects of anything like what I described above coming to fruition are slim to none. But while we can’t stop the source of the massive bleeding, perhaps we can at least apply some Band-Aids.

We need people out there talking and writing about this stuff from a practical orientation. Teach it in your courses. Look for people doing related empirical work and collaborate with them.

And tell your mother to get off Facebook.